Natural language processing technologies in Artificial Intelligence: The science and industry perspective By Klaus K. Obermeier (review)

414 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 67, NUMBER 2 (1991) Brixhe & Lejeune's 1984 Corpus des inscriptions paléo-phrygiennes. Since Phrygian is both closely related to Greek and preserved in part through Greek testimony, N has chosen to present his account as a history of PhrygianGreek linguistic contact. This procedure may explain his vagueness in discussing shared features of the two languages: although he calls them 'common innovations' (10), he seems elsewhere to regard them as the result of borrowing during a hypothesized period of close contact among Greek, Phrygian, and several other IE languages in the south Balkans (5-6). Some of these shared features are quite striking—e.g. factitives in *-oyô like Gk. orthöö 'straighten'. Phr. kakoioi (11, 13), and laryngeal vocalization followed by umlaut in Gk. ónoma, Phr. onoman = [b] not [bh], this development is trivial and proves only that Phrygian did not share the Greek change to [ph] etc.). Pp. 6-10: Common retentions of Greek and Phrygian (e.g. the augment and the thirdperson present middle ending -toi). Pp. 10-13: Common innovations of Greek and Phrygian (e.g. agent nouns in -tä, Gk. autos 'self = Phr. autos 'particular'). Pp. 13-16: Inherited lexical material of Phrygian which is lost or only marginally preserved in Greek. Pp. 16-18: Sometime after the hypothesized period of south Balkan close contact with Greek, the Phrygians migrated to Anatolia, where they are attested in historical times. Contact with speakers ofAnatolian languages led to borrowings into Phrygian (mainly names, e.g. Midas). Pp. 18-19: Greek expansion in the first millennium led to contact and hence Greek loans into Phrygian. Pp. 19-22: Direct attestation of Phrygian lost from the third century B.C.E. through the first century CE. Pp. 22-23: Neo-Phrygian attested in grave inscriptions, still in part uninterpretable . Although Phrygian is unlikely ever to play a significant role in IE historical linguistics, it does, as N remarks in conclusion (23), repay time spent applying to it our knowledge of IE. N's essay is a valuable contribution to the project of understanding Phrygian. [Andrew Garrett, University of Texas, Austin.] Natural language processing technologies in Artificial Intelligence: The science and industry perspective. By Klaus K. Obermeier. Chichester : Ellis Horwood, 1989. Pp. 263. Natural language processing (NLP) is the area of research concerned with the many aspects of 'natural' language communication with computers . In this book Obermeier provides an introduction to NLP from both commercial and academic perspectives, primarily aimed at businessmen and data-processing professionals. His presentation is nontechnical, though very comprehensive . Linguists will find the book an accessible introduction to the practical issues in NLP, which may help to clarify the direction and emphasis in this area of language research. The book's organization is excellent, making it very easy to read, although the typographic and editorial quality are not the best. The twelve chapters are divided into three sections: 'NLP in perspective' (17-92). which provides an introduction to the structure of NLP systems and the approaches and formalisms used to implement them; 'Applications' (93-185), in which six major applications of NLP are described: and 'Bottom line' (187-232), where O presents his own evaluation of the state of NLP research and current systems. A good list of references (239-59) is also included. Much of the material in the first section will be familiar to linguists, since the design of NLP systems is largely based on formal linguistic analyses in the areas ofphonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics. In addition, methods for knowledge representation and reasoning drawn from Artificial Intelligence are explained in relation to their relevance to NLP development. This nontechnical overview of the techniques used in NLP is up-to-date. It includes a discussion of parsing methods ranging from contextfree parsing, unification-based parsing, and ATNs to such knowledge-representation schemes from AI as production rules, semantic networks, and frames, to the new connectionist models. BOOK NOTICES 415 The second section comprises the largest part of the book, with one chapter devoted to each of the applications addressed: natural-language interfaces, machine translation, text processing/ understanding, text generation, speech processing , and writing aids. For each application there is a brief...